“If it had come out the road would be fixed, at least you could say, well, maybe no one else will die,” he said.

The March 29, 2009, crash occurred when Pamela McKeirnan and her daughter were traveling together in two vehicles on their way to go shopping. McKeirnan was in the lead.

Just south of Archie Moore Road, a speeding car driven by Ranchita resident Melvin Pearles crossed the center line on Route 67.

Pearles’ car struck McKeirnan’s vehicle first, then slammed into the Volvo driven by her daughter.

The impact sent Alexandria Drake’s car crashing into a tree. Jayden was strapped into an infant’s safety seat in the back of the car. He escaped serious injury, but his mother died at a hospital some five hours later.

Pearles pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to four years in prison in 2010.

That stretch of Route 67 has been the scene of numerous fatal accidents over the years. The lawsuit by Drake’s family contended that Caltrans was maintaining the road in a dangerous condition and should have done more to make it safe.

On the stretches of the highway that are two and three lanes wide, 31 fatalities occurred from 1999 to 2009.

Those figures increased even as the trial continued this year.

On May 25, four people were killed when a speeding pickup crossed over the center line — just as Pearles had done — and slammed into oncoming traffic.

Caltrans maintains the problem is not so much with the winding road, but with how people drive on it. Speed, not the conditions, are the main culprit, the agency has said.

In the lawsuit by Drake’s family, the jury agreed, concluding that Pearles was responsible for the crash, Schreiber said. The families had sought $4 million in damages.

Pamela McKeirnan said if she is ordered to pay Caltrans’ legal costs she and her husband will lose their home. She said they have lived in Ramona for years, raised their children there, and have seen Route 67 grow more crowded and more lethal.

“I know the dangers of 67,” she said. “When my children made it through their teenage years, I breathed a sigh of relief.”

The larger point of the suit, Pamela McKeirnan and Jay Drake said, was to get Caltrans to change the highway, by widening it or installing concrete median barriers.

The agency has plans to widen the road to four lanes by 2030 and is studying other measures in the interim, including placing a center barrier on the north end of the road as it approaches Ramona. A barrier already exists for a few miles on the south end near Lakeside.